A white, American gunman invaded the Colorado Springs Planned Parenthood last week. In righteous anger he killed three people, wounding nine more. Will we hear the Republican presidential candidates condemn the killings as “radical Christian terrorism”? Probably not. For months, the aspiring Republican hopefuls and other Christian leaders have encouraged violent mayhem with their dishonest and reckless disregard for facts regarding Planned Parenthood. To a person, they have vilified Planned Parenthood using as their excuse the utterly fraudulent, dishonest videos produced by a cell of extremist Christian terrorists.
Are these wannabe Republican leaders proud of their thoughtless stoking of the resentments burning in the bellies of their base?
Their ultimate goal is to concentrate the full power of the U.S. government to coerce all women, against their wills and even to the detriment of their health, to bear every child they conceive. It’s nothing less than government-mandated childbirth. But Christian radical conservatives apparently remain blissfully unaware of their own hypocrisy. They constantly bleat about the intrusiveness of government in the private affairs of citizens even as they demand that same government impose rules concerning sexuality and procreation, peculiar to their own religious sect, upon the entire nation. Freedom for the rest of us, as defined by radical American Christian extremists, is merely the freedom to believe and act as they do, nothing more.
I can hear Christians frothing now: “Not all Christians are extremists or killers,” and “You are painting all Christians with the same broad brush.” Sorry, but since it doesn’t stop you from denigrating those of us who are outside your religious/political tradition, we can’t accept that argument in your defense.
Words have meaning and power. In our blighted world, words conveying hatred or bigotry have even more. The leaders of the Republican Party regularly use the cudgel of religious fanaticism when it suits their purposes, fanning intolerance and sectarianism to rally their base. They imagine that this rhetoric will lead to political success. They are wrong. Horrors like those visited upon the victims in Colorado Springs are the inevitable result.
Larry A. Bollinger
Durango
